Great News For JAILBREAK: Apple Open-Sourced The iOS Kernel

In a very unexpected turn of events, Apple has Open-Sourced the iOS Kernel (arm and arm64) on GitHub. The XNU Kernel has been open-source for years, but not the iOS one, and not to the extent it is right now!

Initially, everyone thought this is a huge mistake from Apple's end, or a leaked tarball, but it is apparently not – Apple really open-sourced the iOS Kernel, which is still unbelievable for me. This saves the security researchers from a lot of reverse engineering and tinkering, since they can simply read the source code and understand what is going on.

For example, with this unexpected release from Apple, we finally learned the real name of the Kernel Protection from the iPhone 7/7+, it is not called AMCC, nor SiDP, it is called KTRR (most likely stands for Kernel Text ReadOnly Region), this has been a mystery ever since it's been introduced, now it is finally solved, and as this one, many others.

Having the source code in plain C/C++ makes it easier to find vulnerabilities. Of course, this doesn't mean a jailbreak will come immediately, nor it means that everything required for a jailbreak can be found in the source code, but it helps the jailbreak developers a lot, as they can gather a tremendous amount of knowledge from the open sourced code.

I have no idea why Apple did this, but it HUGE! it hasn't been done before, so it is the first time developers get to see these files, this will help a lot vulnerability research and possibly future jailbreaks.

C#, C, Objective-C Programmer | Beginner iOS Security Researcher | Content Creator | Web Developer
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